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Hyper-v Server 2012 - An Introduction

Brendan

638

This is a piece of software that rarely seems to be given much air time, so I thought i would blog about some of it's capabilities. Firstly, do not get this confused with windows server 2012 with the hyper-v role installed, but If you're looking for a free of charge hypervisor, capable of integrating with your existing Microsoft infrastructure then this product is well worth a look to see if it fits the bill. With the advent of 2012, Microsoft have been pushing Admins back towards the shell, and if you've been following their latest certification paths then administering this shouldn't be a problem, despite it being cut down to the bare shell.

I aim to cover getting the remote administration down via RSAT, RDP and Power Shell in a further post, so let's go over some of it's capabilities and possible use cases. Many parallels can be drawn here between it's paid for counterpart - the Hyper-v role on server 2012. Integration with servers with a GUI is possible, as is cluster support.

Other than that, you can expect pretty much anything that can be done from the paid for counterpart to be attainable on this free edition including technologies such as VLAN tagging, NIC teaming, and extended replication. I have some upcoming articles on the latter in the near future including securing your traffic with SSL and the underlying CA infrastructure (if you don't already have it in place) for some off-site replication of key services for small businesses on a budget, so check back soon for more on this. Expect to get down and dirty with some power shell in some of my follow up posts, and kudos to Microsoft for a great piece of software made available to the community.